State of the City Address

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By
Rochelle Dean

For a little more than an hour the Mayor talked about the cities successes and things that still need to be improved.

In just his last 30 months in office, the Mayor says the unemployment rate has dropped from 9.5 to 7.6 percent. Also down, the murder rate 20 percent thanks to increased manpower on the street says Benjamin.

In this same amount of time, 320 million dollars worth of improvements to the water, sewer, and storm water systems have been made, in addition to 22 new businesses generating and cultural economic growth generating 13 billion dollars and more than 180 thousand jobs statewide.

Still, there's progress to be made. The Mayor says he supports a comprehensive wage disparity study that may give insight into why our city employees are underpaid and in some cases leaving for jobs to other counterparts.

Still, going from a financial crisis, to 3 consecutive years of a budget surplus, the Mayor says the state of the city is strong.